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UK Safety Net
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Date: Mon, 30 Sep 1996 23:36:06 +1000 From: rene@pobox.com (Irene Graham) To: link@charlotte.anu.edu.au Subject: UK Safety Net (was Bulldog Porno-Watch)
On Fri, 27 Sep 1996 11:07:26 +1000, Roger.Clarke@anu.edu.au (Roger Clarke) wrote:
[....] >LONDON (Reuter) - The British government Monday set up a watchdog to try to >get pornography off the Internet.
The Safety Net proposal actually covers a lot more than that. It basically mandates use of PICS enabled software by everyone (using one ratings system, RSACi).
It also contains very concerning aspects with regard to privacy and anonymity.
Apart from the hotline, it is not about illegal material, because obviously no-one is going to rate illegal material and then distribute it. It's clearly a censorship system hiding behind a claim of industry self-regulation. It's not voluntary when backed up by government threat, i.e. all "responsible" service providers will require all their users to rate all their web pages and Usenet articles and, by implication, if service providers are not seen to be responsible they can anticipate being raided.
It may sound all well and good to require material to be rated to protect children, however, given that PICS enabled software can be configured to restrict access to unrated pages, (notwithstanding the article in the Brisbane Sunday Mail 29/9 whose author I presume overlooked this facility in MS IE), it defies imagination why every Net user in the UK should be required to wade through the definitions of RSACi ratings in order to rate material to protect children (unless of course it is material they wish to make it available to children, or others wishing to limit their access, in the first place). Furthermore the RSACi definitions appear to be based, in part, on computer games classifications which are not particularly easy to apply to still images and text. (RSACi = Recreational Software Advisory Council, Inc).
I'm left wondering if the UK intends, after all UK pages are RSACi rated, to ban access to the rest of the world -- because to access the rest of the world (many countries in which are unlikely to mandate use of RSACi) their citizens would need to disable the blocking of unrated pages. I can see no other reason why all pages and Usenet articles must be rated.
>Safety-Net, which is being financed by the industry, will have a hotline to
[read... financed by the users]
>which callers can report suspected illegal material and wiIl contact police >if necessary. > >It will publish a "legality indicator" or rating for each public access area >on the Internet known as a Usenet news group. The rating will indicate >whether the group normally contains illegal or pornographic material and >what kind.
This is quite concerning. It would appear that once a news group is "rated" as containing any illegal material, an ISP who provides access to it may be liable - they will hardly be able to claim they didn't know they carried illegal material. So, ISPs will cut access to that newsgroup, the material will then most likely be posted in another news group, and so on until Usenet (in the UK at least) ceases to exist?
>Internet users can contact the hotline to complain about material received >from anyone via an automatic telephone, mail, e-mail or facsimile.
I would hope that users reporting illegal material will be protected from prosecution as a result of having viewed/possessed such material. There is however no indication of that in the Safety Net information.
[...]
Full details of the UK Safety Net system start here: http://dtiinfo1.dti.gov.uk/safety-net/index.html
A few choice extracts follow:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ [...] Policies for Word Wide Web Pages 24. The "R3 Safety-Net" approach endorses the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) and the RSACi rating scheme for W3 pages. "R3 Safety-Net" recommends that Service providers:
Promote PICS enabled software for accessing the W3. Require all their users to rate their own web pages using RSACi.* Remove web pages hosted on their servers which are persistently and deliberately misrated.* Remove web pages hosted on their servers which are identified
7 and verified to them as containing child pornography (or other illegal material); if the users fail to co-operate by removing them themselves. [...] Policies for Usenet News groups 27. The approach extends the PICS standard to Usenet news groups and recommends that service providers should:
* Support the development of a new Internet Standard (RFC) for transmitting ratings for news groups according to their 'normal content'. (This is currently being developed by Demon Internet and RSAC.)* Support the availability of rating sources for all Usenet groups* Modify News Servers to deliver group ratings to end-user software, when the standard becomes available. Promote PICS-enabled news software, when available Remove from their servers, within a reasonable time period, news articles identified and verified to them as containing illegal material.
28. These measures will interface with both the Safety-Net Foundation's legality ratings for the normal content of news groups, and with the ratings provided by users for material they have placed on the Internet. In keeping with the principle that users should be remain responsible for the material they post, "R3 Safety-Net" considers that in the long-term, users should be encouraged to rate their news group articles as they post them. The approach of using ratings for the 'normal' content of groups, whether supplied by the Safety Net Foundation or by other sources, is proposed as a first step. It will assist both users and service providers in understanding the nature of material withinthese groups, and help to inform responsible actions towards them. Policies on Traceability 29. A key aspect of the "R3 Safety-Net" approach is that it attempts to ensure that users take responsibility for material they post on the Internet. To this end, it is important to be able to trace the originators of child pornography and other illegal material. In this context, the anonymity that it is possible to achieve through some services can be abused to mask the identity of the perpetrator. 30. Anonymity itself can serve a useful purpose in a number of contexts. However, the abuse of anonymity in posting illegal material is a problem which has to be addressed. Allowing users to have truly anonymous (i.e.: untraceable) accounts is a danger, while providing services which create pseudonyms which remain traceable if necessary, is not. It is therefore recommended that service providers should:
* Work with the Safety-Net Foundation to close known loopholes and to identify and investigate a range of appropriate measures to provide facilities for better traceability, including, for example: + Provision of audit trails such as X-NNTP-Posting-Host; and X-Mail2News-Path.+ Reasonable steps which ensure users of "free trials" can be identified (probably the most significant source of anonymity which is abused) including, but not limited to: Use of Caller Line ID, Verification of Credit Card details at start of trial.+ Development of new and better forms of technical counter-measures* Ensure that anonymous servers (e.g.: re-mailers) that they operate in the UK record details of identity and make this available to the Police, when needed, under Section 28.3 of the Data Protection Act.
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Irene Graham, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
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